God, man & the founding.

TO understand America, one must understand the religion of its Founders: This is the clear lesson of the fine new anthology Protestantism and the American Founding (Notre Dame, 281 pp., $25), edited by Thomas S. Engeman and Michael P. Zuckert. "While there were many religions in 1787," writes Engeman in his introduction, "overwhelmingly they were branches of the Reformed or Calvinist trunk." It is estimated that over three-quarters of Americans at the time of the Revolution were members of denominations from the Puritan wing of the European Reformation--and, says Engeman, "Protestant thought and practice had even greater influence" than these numbers would suggest.

The central question addressed in these essays is: Was the American Founding an Enlightenment-inspired repudiation of the colonies' Puritan heritage, or a natural development out of that Puritan background? Thomas G. West, a professor of politics at the University of Dallas, argues persuasively that it's a serious mistake to view the Founding as a rupture with the Puritan project. Puritanism, he writes, began with a "fierce ... spirit of independence from all human authority while being totally devoted to Christ." This idealism was supplemented in the colonial years by a growing realization that "man's imperfect or fallen nature was ... unchanged by divine grace" and that therefore "limited government and the rule of law were indispensable." This process of political education culminated in the Puritans'adoption--"as part of their theology," West emphasizes--of Lockean social-compact theory.

"The Puritans," West writes, "did not think of themselves as turning away from Christian political theology, but as approaching more closely the truth of that theology.... By the mid-18th century, the 'Calvinists' were no less devoted to the new understanding of politics than the 'rationalists.' ... Just as in early Puritanism, the secular is for the sake of the sacred. But the sacred now includes respect for the God-given liberty of all."

This is a crucial late-Puritan insight: that the revealed laws of God do not conflict with the "self-evident" truths available to the light of reason. Another contributor, Wheaton historian Mark A. Noll, describes the breakthrough as follows: "The merger of Protestant convictions about providence, covenant, and virtue with secular convictions about liberty, rights, and virtue, which had once been only occasional and adventitious, became ubiquitous and systemic." From these roots came the American Founding, in which a basically religious society was fostered and strengthened by a secular government. And the roots, editor Engeman concludes, still vivify the nation: "The founders' friendly disestablishment continues to supply the foundation for a free, religious, and public-spirited democracy."

* Do not be deterred, if you are neither young nor Catholic, from reading George Weigel's excellent Letters to a Young Catholic (Basic, 251 pp., $22.50); it's a charming and eloquent extended essay that genuinely captures the spirit of a great religious tradition. Weigel communicates the sense that lived Catholicism is more than the sum of its dogmas: It is, "at bottom, a way of seeing the world." A central distinguishing feature of Catholicism, throughout its history, has been how seriously it has taken the physical world. Weigel points to the "sacramental imagination--the core Catholic conviction that God saves and sanctifies the world through the materials of the world." This is a theology of Incarnation, and it reaches the very heart of Christianity. Weigel quotes a marvelous comment Evelyn Waugh made to George Orwell about his novel 1984. "The book failed to make my flesh creep as presumably you intended," said Waugh, because "men who have loved a crucified God need never think of torture as all-powerful."

Moving and provocative, this book offers many pleasures. I also strongly recommend Weigel's monumental Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II; it's one of the best religious biographies ever written.